Part 14

For the sake of moral values I ought to wish, I suppose, that Paramore had been a more conspicuous figure. There is moral significance in the true tale of Paramore--the tale which has been left to me in trust by Hoyting. I cursed Hoyting when he did it; for Paramore’s reputation was nothing to me, and what Paramore knew or didn’t know was in my eyes unspeakably unimportant. I wish it clearly understood, you see, that if Paramore deliberately confused exogamy and endogamy in the Australian bush, it doesn’t in the least matter to me. Paramore is only a symbol. As a symbol, I am compelled to feel him important. That is why I wish that his name were ringing in the ears and vibrating on the lips of all of you. His bad anthropology doesn’t matter--a dozen big people are delightedly setting that straight--but the adventure of his soul immensely does. Rightly read, it’s as sound as a homily and as dramatic as Euripides. The commonest field may be chosen by opposing generals to be decisive; and in a day history is born where before only the quiet wheat has sprung. Paramore is like that. The hostile forces converged by chance upon his breast.

I have implied that Paramore was never conspicuous. That is to be more merciful than just. The general public cares no more, I suppose, than I do about the marriage customs of Australian aborigines. But nowadays the general public has in pay, as it were, an army of scientists in every field. We all expect to be told in our daily papers of their most important victories, and have a comfortable feeling that we, as the age, are subsidizing research. By the same token, if they deceive us, we--the age--are personally injured and fall to “muck-raking.” It is typical that no one had been much interested in Paramore until he was discredited, and that then, quite without intelligible documents, we all began to despise him. The situation, for that matter, was not without elements of humor. The facts, as I and the general public knew them, were these--before Hoyting, with his damnable inside information, came into it.

Paramore sprang one day, full-armed, from some special academic obscurity. He had scraped together enough money to bury himself in the Australian bush and grapple face to face with primitive religion in its most concrete form. Each to his taste; and I dare say some casual newspaper readers wished him godspeed. There followed the proper interval of time; then an emaciated Paramore suddenly emerging, laden with note-books; then the published volume, very striking and revolutionary, a treasure-house of authentic and indecent anecdote. He could write, too, which was part of his evil fate; so that a great many people read him. That, however, was not Paramore’s fault. His heart, I believe, was in Great Russell Street, where the Royal Anthropologists have power to accept or reject. He probably wanted the alphabet picturesquely arranged after his name. At all events, he got it in large measure. You see, his evidence completely upset a lot of hard-won theories about mother-right and group-marriage; and he didn’t hesitate to contradict the very greatest. He actually made a few people speak lightly of _The Golden Bough_. No scientist had ever spent so long at primitive man’s very hearth as Paramore had. It was a tremendous achievement. He had data that must have been more dangerous to collect than the official conversation of nihilists. It was his daring that won him the momentary admiration of the public to which exogamy is a ludicrously unimportant noun. Very soon, of course, every one forgot.

It was not more than two years after his book was printed that the newspapers took him up again. Most of them appended to the despatch a brief biography of Paramore. No biographies were needed in Great Russell Street. This was the point where the comic spirit decided to meddle. A few Germans had always been protesting at inconsistencies in Paramore’s book, and no one had paid any attention to them. There is always a learned German protesting somewhere. The general attitude among the great was: any one may challenge or improve Paramore’s conclusions--in fact, it’s going to be our delightful task for ten years to get more out of Paramore than he can get out of himself--but do get down on your knees before the immense amount of material he has taken the almost fatal trouble to collect for us. No other European was in a position to discredit Paramore. It took an Australian planter to do that. Whitaker was his quite accidentally notorious name. The comic spirit pushed him on a North German Lloyder at Melbourne, to spend a few happy months in London. It was perfectly natural that people who talked to him at all should mention Paramore. The unnatural thing was that he knew all about Paramore. He didn’t tell all he knew--as I learned afterward--but he told at least enough to prove that Paramore hadn’t spent so much time in the bush as would have been absolutely necessary to compile one-quarter of his note-books. Whitaker was sufficiently reticent about what Paramore had been doing most of the time; but he knew for a fact, and took a sporting interest in proving it, that Paramore had never been west of the Musgrave Range. That in itself sufficed to ruin Paramore. It was perfectly easy, then, for the little chorus from Bonn, Heidelberg, etc., to prove in their meticulous way that both his cribbing and lying (his whole treatment of Spencer and Gillen was positively artistic) had all been mere dust-throwing. Of course, what Paramore really had achieved ceased from that moment to count. He had blasphemed; and the holy inquisition of science would do the rest. It all took a certain amount of time, but that was the net result.

Paramore made no defence, oddly enough. Some kind people arranged an accidental encounter between him and Whitaker. The comic spirit was hostess, and the newspapers described it. It gave the cartoonists a happy week. Then an international complication intervened, and the next thing the newspapers found time to say about him was that he had gone to the Upper Niger, still on folk-lore bent. That fact would have been stupendous if it hadn’t been so unimportant. Two years later, the fickle press returned to him just long enough to say that he had died. I certainly thought then that we had heard the last of him. But the comic spirit had laid her inexorable finger on Hoyting. And suddenly, as if in retribution for my spasmodic interest in Paramore’s beautiful fraud, Hoyting sent for me.

I went to one of the rue de Rivoli hotels and met him by appointment. Of course, he hadn’t told me what it was about. Hoyting never writes; and he puts as little into a telegram as a frugal old maid. Any sign from Hoyting, however, would have sufficed to bring me to Paris; and I stayed in my hotel, never budging even for the Salon, so close at hand, until Hoyting appeared in my sitting-room.

I asked Hoyting no questions. I hadn’t an idea of what he wanted. It might, given Hoyting, be anything. He began without preliminaries--except looking frightfully tired. That, for Hoyting, was a rather appalling preliminary.

“Three months ago I was in Dakar. I don’t know just why I had drifted to Sénégal, except that I’ve come to feel that if there must be colonial governments they had better be French. If there was any special thing that pushed me, I’ve forgotten it.

“They were decentish people, those French officers and their wives. A little stiff always, never expatriated, never quite at ease in their African inn, but not half so likely to go _fantee_ as the romantic Briton. And once a fortnight the little boats from Bordeaux would come in, bringing more of them. I rather liked them; but, even so, there wasn’t any particular reason for my staying so long in Dakar. I hung on like an alarm that has been set. I couldn’t go off--or on--until the moment I was set for. I don’t suppose the alarm-clock knows until the vibration begins within it. Something kept me there in that dull, glaring, little official town, with its dry dock and torpedo basin, which, of course, they had managed to endow with the flavor of provincial France. They do that everywhere--you’ll have noticed?

“I used to go up sometimes in the comparative cool of the evening to dine with the Fathers. It isn’t that I hold with them much--Rome was introduced to me in my childhood as the Scarlet Woman--but all travellers have the same tale to tell. They are incomparable missionaries. And it stands to reason that they can get on better with savages than the rest of you. You can meet magic only with magic. It was they who introduced me to Paramore.”

“Oh, it’s Paramore!” I exclaimed. “Heaven, forgive you, Hoyting, you are always in at the death. How do you manage it? But fancy being in at Paramore’s! By the way, I suppose you know that no one knows anything except that he’s dead.”

“Umph! Well, I do,” returned Hoyting. “That’s what I was set for--like the clock: to turn up at the Mission House just when he was brought in there with fever. I don’t go hunting for things like that, you understand. I’d as soon have thought of staying on for Madame Pothier’s _beaux yeux_.”

“I didn’t know you knew whether eyes were fine or not.”

“I suppose I don’t. But I can guess. There are always other people to tell you. Anyhow, her fine eyes were all for _le bon Dieu_ and Pothier. She was a good sort--married out of a little provincial convent-school to a man twice her age, and taking ship within a month for Sénégal. She loved him--for his scars, probably, Desdemona-fashion. Have you ever noticed that a woman often likes a man better for a crooked white seam across his face that spoils all the modelling? Naïve notions women have about war! They tiptoe round the carnage, making eyes at the slayers. Oh, in imagination, of course. And if they once appreciate how they really feel about it, they begin to gabble about disarmament.”

Hoyting fingered the dingy little packet that he had taken out of his pocket and laid on my table. He looked far away out of the window for a moment, narrowing his eyes as if trying to focus them on another hemisphere.

“So he was taken to the Pothiers’.”

“You’re leaving out a lot,” I interrupted. “Why ‘so,’ and why to the Pothiers? You said to the Mission.”

“Oh”--His brows knitted. He didn’t like filling up his own gaps. The things Hoyting takes it for granted one will know about his exotic context! “The Mission was full of patients--an epidemic had been running through the converts, and it was up to them to prove that the sacrament of baptism wasn’t some deadly process of inoculation. As I say, it’s all magic, white or black. Poor Paramore wasn’t a convert--he was by way of being an agnostic, I imagine--and the Fathers weren’t, in a sense, responsible for him. Yet one must do them the justice to say that they’d never have sent him away if they hadn’t had a better place to send him to. The Mission was no place at the moment for a man with fever--sweating infection as it was, and full of frightened patients who were hiding _gri-gris_ under their armpits and looking more than askance at the crucifixes over the doors. The Pothiers had known Paramore two years before, when he had stopped in Dakar on his way into the interior. They took him in quite naturally and simply. Paramore had noticed her fine eyes, I believe--oh, in all honor and loyalty. There were lots of ways in which he wasn’t a rotter. He was merely the finest liar in the world--and a bit of a Puritan to boot.

“Is there any combination life hasn’t exhausted, I wonder?” Hoyting walked to the window, his hands in his pockets, looking down at the eternal race of the taxicabs below. “Think of what may be going by in any one of those taxis. And Paramore _was_ a bit of a Puritan, for all his years of fake anthropology.”

His face was heavily weary as presently he turned it to me.

“I was involved in Paramore’s case. I’ve been to the bottom of this thing, I tell you. Paramore overflowed--emptied himself like a well; and at the end there was absolutely nothing left in his mind; it was void, up to the black brim. Then he died--quite vacuous. He had simply poured out his inner life around me. I was left alone in Dakar, swimming in the infernal pool of Paramore’s cerebrations. You can’t, on the banks of the Sénégal, refer a man to his solicitors. If Paramore had been a Catholic, I could have turned his case over to the Bishop. But bishops had nothing to do with Paramore. And that’s where you come in.”

“Oh, I come in, do I?” I asked a little fearfully. No one wants to come in where Hoyting leaves off.

“Of course. Why else did I make an appointment with you? You’ll take this packet when you leave. You don’t suppose I’m going to London!”

“I didn’t know Paramore.”

“No; but I did. And when I’ve told you, you’ll see. I don’t take a trip like this for nothing. I hate the very smell of the asphalt.”

“Go on.” It’s what one always says to Hoyting.

“I can’t tell it coherently--though I can tell it, I suppose, more coherently than he did. In the first place, what do you know about him?”

The question sent a flood of dingy reminiscence welling slowly and muddily up through my consciousness. I thought for a moment. What, after all, was there to tell about Paramore except that he had lied, and that in the end he had been discredited as lavishly as for a time he had been believed? For any one else I might have made a sprightly little story out of the elliptical narrative of the newspapers; but no one that I know of has ever tried to be a _raconteur_ for Hoyting. He has use only for the raw material; art disgusts him. I gave him as rapid a _précis_ as I could, suppressing all instinct to embroider it.

When I had finished: “He’s completely discredited, then?”

I waved my hands. “My dear Hoyting, no one would take Paramore’s word about the manners and customs of his own household.”

“It’s a pity,” said Hoyting simply. “It makes it harder for you.”

“I’ve nothing to do with Paramore. If there’s one thing that interests me less than his disaster, it’s his rehabilitation.” I didn’t mean to be flippant, but Hoyting’s ominousness invited it.

“Oh, rehabilitation--no; I dare say, between us, we couldn’t manage that. I merely want to get the truth off my hands.”

Hoyting lighted another cigarette. The atmosphere of my room was already densely blue, and I opened the window. His hand shot up. “Shut that, please. I can’t be interrupted by all those savage noises. God! for a breath of sea air!”

I sat down and faced him. After all, the man has never lived who could stage-manage Hoyting.

“Did you ever meet the Australian?” he asked.

“Whitaker? No.”

“A pretty bad lot, I gather.”

“Do you mean that he lied?”

“Oh, no. From what Paramore said, I should think that was just the one thing he didn’t do.”

Hoyting dropped his chin on his breast and narrowed his eyes. Then he shook his head very slowly. “At my time of life it’s silly to be always saying how strange things are, and how clever life is, and all that literary nonsense; but, on my word, if ever a scene was arranged to make a man a protagonist in spite of himself, this was it. Every element in that Dakar situation was contrived to bring Paramore out. He had fever and the prescience of death--which is often mistaken, but works just as well notwithstanding; he had performed his extraordinary task; he was in love with Madame Pothier. The cup was spilling over, and I was there to wipe up the overflow.”

Hoyting was silent for a moment. Then he spoke irritably.

“I don’t know where to begin. There isn’t any beginning to this story. It hasn’t any climax--or else it’s all climax. It’s just a mess. Well, I shall have to begin, I suppose, if Paramore didn’t. Perhaps the first thing was his sitting up in bed one morning and peering out at me through his mosquito-netting. It gave him a queer, caged look. His voice went with it--that cracked and throaty voice they have, you know. ‘Do you know Whitaker?’ he asked.

“‘No, indeed,’ I said. ‘You’d better lie down.’

“If you could have seen him then, you’d have felt, as I did, that he’d better not talk; that he wouldn’t say anything one wanted to hear.

“‘It was Whitaker that finished me.’ Still he peered out at me.

“‘You’re not finished.’ I remember lying quite peevishly about it. He so obviously _was_ finished.

“‘Yes, I am. And Whitaker did it. Oh, I mean I really did it.’

“I give you my word that he was startling, with that unnatural voice, that cunning look in his eyes the sick often get, and those little white cross-bars pressed against his face.

“‘Lie down,’ I said again. ‘What did Whitaker do?’

“He shook his head a little, and the netting moved on his face. It was horrid.

“‘He told them I couldn’t have done the stuff I’d brought back.’

“‘Did he know?’

“‘He didn’t know anything about folk-lore, but he did know where I’d been.’

“He spoke so impersonally that it led me on to ask questions. After all, I had told Madame Pothier I would stay with him through the morning, and I had to make the time go somehow for both of us. It was remittent fever without the chills, and there were fairish mornings at first. The afternoons and nights, when the malady rose like a wave and broke horribly after midnight--oh, those were bad. Madame Pothier and the regimental doctor took care of those. It looked fairly hopeful when he arrived, but finally all the worst symptoms came out, and before the end it was very bad. It was one of those cases that might, at the last, be yellow fever and just technically isn’t. Poor Paramore! Did I say that his face looked as old as all time under that shock of sun-bleached hair? It did.

“That questioning was the first of it. It fixed the name of Whitaker in my mind. I thought I’d find out something about him. You never can tell what will comfort a man in that state. But the Pothiers had never heard of him, or the Fathers at the Mission. I only mention those first remarks of Paramore’s to show you how I came into it. I had never heard of Paramore himself until that time in Dakar. I never read newspapers. All those good people said Paramore was a ‘grand savant,’ but they seemed a little vague, themselves. The only person who wasn’t vague was a lean, old, parchment-colored Father who was waiting for the next boat to take him home. He had been twenty years in the interior, and he was worn out--all except his voice, which was startlingly deep. He said no one could afford to study fetich but a priest. Père Bernard had no respect for anthropologists--thought they took a collector’s interest in preserving various primeval forms of sin, I suppose. I didn’t care for his mediæval manners, and I went back to Paramore with more sympathy. What a world! I always wondered if Paramore had some time, somewhere at the back of beyond, got him on the raw. Well, we shall never know. And yet I dare say the reverend old gentleman is here in Paris at this very moment. What a world! Nothing in it, according to Père Bernard, that isn’t magic--either white or black.

“I can’t tell you by what steps Paramore led me to his tragedy. I don’t remember those days separately at all. They went in jagged ups and downs--times when he talked, times when he was dumb, times when he might be said to rave. Then, too, he brought things out in no order at all. It was as if he lay in a world beyond perspective and expected you to sit outside of Space and Time, too, and see it all whole, as he did. That was rather unpleasant--he had so the manner of being dead and seeing his life from so far off that one thing in it was as near and as real as another. There was absolutely no selection. It was only by recurrence of certain things that you got any stress. And out of it all I managed to get the three main facts: the Royal Anthropological Institute, Whitaker, and the soul of Paramore. Madame Pothier was a close fourth, but she was only an accessory after the fact. That I swear. You believe it?”

I jerked my head up. “Good Heavens, Hoyting, how do I know? You haven’t told me anything yet.”

He rubbed his hands over his brows and frowned with closed eyes. “No; I beg your pardon. But, as I say, I see the whole thing. It’s hard to tell. It never was told to me. And I didn’t want you to think it was one of those silly tales of a man’s turning hero because he’s in love with a woman. If Paramore had asked me to tell Madame Pothier the story I’m telling you, I’d have turned on my heel and left him, if he’d been at the death gasp. I swear I would.”

Hoyting lighted another cigarette--the world’s supply must be inexhaustible!--and seemed to brace his huge body for concentrated effort.

“Well, here it is. Paramore had one passion in life--one double-distilled, quintessentially pure passion--and that passion was anthropology. There never was a stiffer, straighter, more Puritanical devotion to an idea than his. Get that into your head first, if you want to understand.”

I could be forgiven, it strikes me, for being sceptical, in the light of that neat _précis_ I had compiled from the newspapers. “Oh, come, Hoyting,” I said, “science doesn’t recruit from liars--not even when they’ve got Paramore’s deuced cheek. You are upset.”

One look at Hoyting’s gigantic lassitude put me in the wrong. It would take more than Paramore to upset Hoyting. He was perfectly firm, though very much bored. Imagine neurasthenia and Hoyting bunking together! One can’t. Hoyting smiled.

“No, it’s not nerves. Only you people who want everything all of a piece--you irritate me. The point about Paramore is that he combined contradictions. He was magnificently human. And as I am in possession of facts, I ask you to suspend your silly judgment until I’ve done. If you know anything about me, you know that I don’t go in for theories.”

I was silent.